Yuval, Avik Roy, Ramesh, Michael Walsh, and Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard, among many others, have all written perceptively about the relationship between Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital and our political economy.
I think that this paragraph from Jonathan Last gets to the nub of the issue:
Romney’s work at Bain differs in some important ways from how he has characterized it thus far. When Romney says that his goal at Bain was to “create jobs,” that’s not entirely true. As a private equity firm, Bain’s goal was to maximize return on investment (ROI) for a small group of high net worth investors. Sometimes that meant giving seed money to a promising start-up. Sometimes it meant rescuing a company and turning it around. Sometimes it meant finding revenue streams a company hadn’t realized—including government bailouts. Sometimes it meant off-shoring a company’s jobs. And sometimes it meant finding a company whose component parts were worth more than the whole—and dismantling it.
Without respect to the electoral politics and messaging for a moment, the predominant form of “bad” capitalism in contemporary America is created by the joining of a capitalist enterprise with the coercive power of the state, not by the impurity of the motivations of the capitalist. This distinction is crucial for defenders of free enterprise.
Link to article:Romney & Bain: Intention versus Method - By Jim Manzi - The Corner - National Review Online
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